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Smart watering for smart cities and beyond

by

David Leder

Water is expensive. While many areas suffer drought and others are challenged with aging infrastructures, the costs of city and agricultural irrigation keep escalating. As a result, cities and businesses worldwide are shifting toward smart watering solutions to more efficiently and cost-effectively manage water use.

Smart cities are rapidly evolving with solutions for everything from parking and street lights, to connected trash bins, thanks to the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT innovations are also having a major impact on water consumption and conservation, helping to drive down costs and improve sustainability.

Automating water management to increase savings

IoT enables connected, intelligent irrigation solutions that can be monitored and managed remotely, enabling smart cities and farms to save millions of gallons of water, with significant cost savings. In Canada, SMART Watering Systems (SWS) offers IoT software solutions to automate water metering for landscape irrigation customers, as well as horticultural and municipal infrastructure industries.

SWS relies on the Cisco Jasper Control Center platform to remotely manage connectivity for all their customers’ smart watering devices. With real-time visibility and automated rules to control device behavior, SWS has dramatically increased operational efficiency, while ensuring the highest service reliability for their customers. Control Center makes it easy to turn devices on and off, and fix problems fast – all in a few clicks. Streamlining IoT device management has enabled SWS to reduce their manpower needs by 75%.

Reducing water waste with real-time insights

Even industrial and large commercial businesses like Costco are employing smart watering solutions to more effectively control usage and lower costs. Consuming water for various operations, these organizations typically have no insight into how much water they’re using, how much they really need, and how much is being wasted through mechanical failures or misuse.

IoT is changing all that. For example, the Apana smart water management solution provides real-time analytics to identify water waste as it’s occurring, and provides actionable insights to front-line staff that help them address and eliminate waste. Isolating water loss helps companies also develop a baseline for necessary water consumption. As a result, Apana typically helps businesses reduce their water footprint by 20%.

To capture smart watering data, Apana has to manage connectivity for thousands of IoT devices across many diverse customer sites. With Control Center, they can automate configuration, deployment and management of devices to scale rapidly. Apana takes advantage of Cisco Jasper’s partnerships with 50+ mobile operators across 550+ global networks, to easily expand into new markets, using the same platform for all their devices, anywhere in the world.

Transforming water management with IoT

As smart cities gradually become the norm, smart watering will play an increasingly important role in cost management and sustainability. With connected solutions helping to solve challenges such as water loss and inefficient maintenance, we can expect to see the impact of IoT in agriculture, city infrastructures, and businesses big and small. Even consumers are benefiting from smart sprinkler systems they can control from anywhere via Wi-Fi. It’s not surprising that a global study estimates the smart water management market will grow an average of 17% per year.

Before long, there will be millions of smart water metering devices in use. Organizations managing these solutions can keep devices reliably connected, save time by solving problems remotely, and scale quickly using the Control Center automated connectivity management platform. Learn more with our video tours or request a personalized demo.